High freezing levels and snow on the volcanoes...

Does anyone know how the NWS forecasts for high elevations around here?
Right npw, if you select a spot on weather.gov that's around 9500 on Rainier, they're forecasting obscene amounts of snow over the next few days. But down at Paradise it's freezing rain going to rain. Makes sense because this is a wet and warm air mass riding up and over a cooler one. But, wouldn't that mean rain up high? Something about the forecast freezing levels in events like this is very suspicious. We're supposed to have 7500' levels till Sunday, but I just dont trust it. This new Muir telemetry could shed some light on the question

the common wisdom is that the higher you go, the colder it gets, no matter what the weather pattern. the accepted rule of thumb in the pnw seems to be to subtract 3 degress per 1000ft of elevation; and i have anecdotal evidence that it works...

For the Muir microclimate, and this time of year, something that seems to happen often is that precip for ANY freezing level might not help the Muir Snowfield at all. The clouds pile up against the mountain from a front, but rather than climbing up the mountain, they go around. Result is a cloud deck top that stops somewhere between Pan Pt and Pebble Crk. Even if large amounts of precip at Paradise are falling out of that cloud deck, there's nothing happening above. It's too bad that the Muir telem has no precip gauges. You can sometimes infer whether there's precip from the RH (in NW precip at RH under mebbe 95% is unlikely).

Plus there's the wind, which often strips a lot of snow right after it falls when the weather changes.

I do wonder how much of a similar cloud deck phenomenon happens on other volcanoes.

Good point, I hadnt considered that Muir could be above the clouds during these sorts of events. So, you could have a freezing level that's above or at the cloud deck, which does us little good. I'm still wary of these predicted snowfall amounts though, I think the weather service model that computes these amounts may just take liquid precip and temps forecast at sea-level, apply a cooling rate, and then assume it's colder up above, when in actuality there is an inversion happening somewhere in there.

The forecasted freezing levels usually take the inversion into account, so it refers to the "true" freezing level (e.g. the second freezing level, above the layer of warm air).  So it sounds like much of this will be snow at Muir (unless it's above the clouds), at least until the snow levels jump to 11500ft on Sunday.

The summit of Baker has 74 inches of snow forecast through next Tuesday night, but rain on Sunday.

Interesting discussion, but I have to say this kind of weather makes me understand "Seasonal Affective Disorder" syndrome! Even if it does snow up high...

Remember this week last year?

At least the Pineapple doesn't have much snow to wash away!

From the NWS Forecast Discussion:
THE SUNDAY NIGHT/MONDAY RAINFALL EVENT COULD BE A PROLIFIC FLOOD PRODUCER IF
THE 12Z GFS SOLUTION SHOWING WIDESPREAD 12-HOUR RAINFALL TOTALS IN
EXCESS OF 4 INCHES OVER THE OLYMPICS AND CASCADES TURNS OUT. 850 MB
TEMPS RISING TO +12C WILL MEAN WAY HIGH FREEZING AND SNOW LEVELS.

Ouch.